Oops ! I Married My Boss.

My Husband Has a Spreadsheet for Everything

On the first morning of her marriage, Anaya woke to the sound of a printer.

She lay still for a moment, staring at the cracked ceiling and trying to remember why her flat smelled like ironed shirts. Then she remembered, and she groaned into her pillow so loudly the neighbour's cat answered.

In the living room, Armaan stood in a crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, feeding paper into her ancient printer as if it were a hostile witness. His sherwani was folded on the sofa arm. The sofa itself, where he'd slept, had been remade so tightly that a coin could have bounced off it.

"Good morning," he said, without turning. "I've drafted a household agreement."

"It's six-thirty."

"Yes. We're already behind."

He handed her a stapled document. The cover page read DOMESTIC OPERATIONS: VERSION 1.0. Inside were colour-coded tabs, a bathroom rota, a grocery matrix and a flow chart titled Procedure in Event of Dispute.

Anaya flipped through it, speechless. "You made this overnight."

"I couldn't sleep."

"On a sofa, in a stranger's flat, on your wedding night. Truly the peak of human productivity."

"You're not a stranger. You're my employee."

"Not at home I'm not."

"Hence tab four," he said, and pointed. "Boundaries."

She read tab four. It listed, in order: No entering the bedroom without knocking. No touching my files. No leaving mugs in the sink overnight. There was a footnote about the thermostat.

"I don't have a thermostat."

"You have an AC remote with seven buttons I don't understand. I assume it's the same thing."

"It's twenty-four degrees. It's always twenty-four degrees."

"It's wasteful."

"It's Mumbai, Armaan."

The first week of marriage went like a very polite war.

The bathroom schedule gave him 6:45 to 7:00 and her 7:00 to 7:20, a ratio she found insulting, so she took to singing in the shower at 6:50 on purpose, loudly and badly, until he knocked on the door and said, with great dignity, "That is a Kishore Kumar song, and you are a crime against it."

The food matrix was worse. He ate steel-cut oats at exactly 7:30. Anaya ate leftover pizza, cold, standing at the fridge, in whatever she'd slept in.

"That's not breakfast," he said, appalled.

"It has cheese and bread. That's two food groups."

"It has regret."

"So does your oatmeal. It just has better PR."

Neither of them admitted that on the fourth day he started leaving a second bowl of oats on the counter, and on the fifth she started eating it.

Pretending at work was a different kind of torture.

"Miss Karvekar," Armaan said on Monday, across a glass desk, in front of the entire HR team. "Have you completed the vendor audit?"

"Yes, sir." She'd completed it at midnight, at the kitchen table, while he sat three feet away reading Harvard Business Review and coughing pointedly every time she sighed. "It's on your desk, sir."

"The font is wrong."

"It's the same font as last quarter, sir."

"Then last quarter was also wrong."

Reema, in the corner with a file, mouthed the word comma at her in sympathy.

What the others didn't see was that by Wednesday, Armaan had somehow reassigned three of her tasks to places where she had to work in his office. Her desk, he explained, was "too far from the printer." The printer, which was a metre from her desk, was "too slow." The conference room was "poorly ventilated." On Thursday he called her in to ask whether she'd like to review the Mehta file here, in the chair opposite his, "for efficiency."

She sat there for two hours, hating him, aware of every sound he made. She noticed when he tapped his pen against his lip, and when he rubbed the scar over his left eyebrow, and the soft sigh he gave when a number came out right.

He's doing it on purpose, she thought. He's torturing me for entertainment.

She narrowed her eyes. Across the desk, Armaan looked up and caught her glaring, and the corner of his mouth, just barely, lifted.

Yes, she thought. Definitely entertainment.

The thermostat war peaked on the second Friday.

Anaya came home to find the AC off, the windows open, and her husband sitting in shirt-sleeves, fanning himself with a procurement report.

"It's thirty-one degrees outside," she said.

"It's natural ventilation."

"It's sweat."

"The electricity bill—"

"I pay the electricity bill! In my flat!"

"We're married," he said. "It's our flat."

The words landed oddly. They both heard it, and for a second the argument just stopped, like a record skipping.

"Fine," Anaya said finally, in a smaller voice. "Twenty-six. Compromise."

"Twenty-five."

"Twenty-five and a half."

"There's no half on the remote."

"I'm inventing one."

He laughed. It was a short, startled sound, and it made her stomach flip, which she attributed to the pizza.

On Sunday night she fell asleep at the kitchen table.

It was the Singapore contract again, revision nine. She'd propped her chin on one hand and told herself she'd close her eyes for a moment. The next thing she knew, the world had gone soft and warm, and someone was gently drawing a file out from under her cheek.

She half-opened her eyes.

Armaan was crouched beside her chair in the dim yellow light, in a creased T-shirt, with his hair a mess. He'd draped his own jacket across her shoulders. He was looking at her face with an expression she'd never seen on him, quiet and unguarded and a little bewildered, as if he'd walked into a room he hadn't known existed.

His thumb came up, slowly, and brushed a smear of blue ink off her cheekbone.

Neither of them breathed.

"You had ink," he said, very quietly.

"Oh," said Anaya.

"On your face."

"Right."

His hand lingered a moment longer than ink required. Then he drew it back and stood, clearing his throat.

"Go to bed," he said gruffly. "You have a vendor audit in the morning."

"You're the one who assigned the vendor audit."

"Then you should know how important it is."

She went to bed. She lay awake for a long time staring at the cracked ceiling, her cheek still warm in one precise spot. In the living room, she heard the quiet creak of the sofa and the long, unsteady sigh of a man who was also not sleeping.

At breakfast neither of them mentioned it. He passed her the oats and she ate them. The thermostat sat at twenty-five and a half.